If it was meant as an allegory for Led Zeppelin, no one was saying so. John Paul found the whole episode embarrassing—his acting, especially, but nothing more so than his appearance. After the U.S. tour, he’d cut his long hair in a style that was more army recruit than rock star. For the purposes of continuity, he was forced to wear a cheesy Sir Lancelot page-boy wig, giving his scenes of pillaging a kooky, high-camp effect.

  Robert’s sequence was just as awkward. Filmed on the beaches of Cardigan Bay in Wales, he envisioned himself as a dashing Arthurian knight, as evinced by mincing, studly poses in a flowing white cape, on a quest to rescue a fair maiden, who, Robert was overheard to say, returned the favor in ways characteristic of Led Zeppelin’s extramarital pursuits. In a series of far-fetched sketches, Robert scaled the walls of Raglan Castle, brandished a sword, and fenced to the finish with a raggedy lout. The duel ended when the hero hurled the cad over the castle wall into the moat below. One thing was clear: Robert Plant had nothing on Errol Flynn. Throughout the scenes, he repeatedly strayed out of character and had trouble keeping a straight face. Even the score, a mash-up of “The Rain Song” and “The Song Remains the Same,” lent the action a florid artificiality.

  Bonzo, to his credit, decided to play it straight. “The camera people came down to my place for a week, and if I was going out somewhere they’d . . . just follow me about,” he said. To no less an oratorio than “Moby Dick,” Bonzo was filmed in his natural habitat—playing pool at the Conservative Club, having a pint at his local pub, tootling about in a horse and cart with his wife, Pat, drag racing along country lanes in a newly acquired Model T Ford and at Santa Pod Raceway in a nitrogen-fueled AA Dragster, showing off his herd of steer, and bumping around Old Hyde Farm, his estate in Worcestershire.

  Peter Grant had already been represented fairly accurately in the scene of him verbally berating a promoter at the Baltimore gig. But just in case his character warranted further definition, he appeared in a skit with his henchman, Richard Cole, in which the two villains were typecast as . . . villains, dressed in Roaring Twenties garb, tear-assing around in a 1928 Pierce-Arrow and dispensing mob justice with machine guns. No doubt the scene gave the creeps to a whole host of viewers who, at one time or another, had been roughed up by the pair.

  Jimmy, typically, insisted he be filmed last and on the night of a full moon. A few days before Christmas 1973, he met Joe Massot’s crew at Boleskine House, the former Crowley residence near Loch Ness. “Jimmy felt he had something to say about time and the passage of time,” Massot recalled. “There’s a mountain out back of his house in Scotland, so he decided that he would climb it and act out a very symbolical tale about a young man fighting his way to the top to meet with the old man of the mountain at the summit, Father Time.” Both characters, of course, were played by Jimmy Page.

  “They created several different faces that showed me as I might look at various ages of life,” Jimmy explained. “Then they joined all those shots of the different faces together.” It was an honest attempt to express a larger idea. “What I was trying to say was that enlightenment can be achieved at any point in time; it just depends on when you want to access it.”

  Massot now had plenty of film in the can, some of it intriguing, most of it a mishmash that needed to be assembled into a coherent theme. The concert footage was spotty, the fantasy stuff mostly cringeworthy. And Peter Grant was breathing down his back. Something told G he’d bought a pig in a poke. A lot of time and money had been invested in the project. (Peter had begun referring to it as “the most expensive home movie ever made.”) A rough cut might provide a measure of comfort, a kind of road map to determine where everything was headed, but that would require a few months’ time in the editing room, pushing the ETA into the spring of 1974.

  By that time, Led Zeppelin was otherwise engaged.

  [2]

  The itch began in late October 1973. Led Zeppelin had been off the road for a good long month, without a word of complaint from any of its four principals. No one was about to torpedo a good thing. But a month without music—away from playing—was harder to reconcile. A tingle developed under the skin, and with it came the need to scratch that itch.

  Jimmy, ever itchy, gathered the troops. He was already looking down the road at another album. It was high time to put some things down on tape, so he sent word: everyone was expected to meet at Headley Grange at the end of the month for a stretch of recording. He’d arranged for a sound truck—an Airstream RV belonging to the Faces’ Ronnie Lane that had been converted into a mobile unit with a sixteen-track board—and a hot young engineer, Ron Nevison, who had just finished working with The Who on Quadrophenia.

  Headley Grange was key to the sound in Jimmy’s head, a return to the expansive, echo-filled chamber that had captured such knockout rockers as “Celebration Day,” “Black Dog,” and “Rock and Roll.” “Most of the album will get back to something people think we’ve been drifting away from: straightforward rock ’n roll,” he avowed.

  Be that as it may, the Grange was uneasy about renting to Led Zeppelin again. During their last visit, Bonzo, in a drunken rampage, had driven a Range Rover back and forth across the lawn and garden, and the owners refused to book the place until reparations were made.

  Another unexpected problem: John Paul Jones never showed. “He turned up at my house one afternoon and told me he’d had enough,” Peter Grant recalled. This was an alarming piece of news. No one had seen this coming. G asked Jonesy what he intended to do if he left the band and got a typically droll answer. “He said he was going to be the choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral.”

  “I’d had enough of touring,” John Paul revealed. “There was a lot of pressure on my family, what with being away so long.” His young daughters were growing up without their father. And truthfully, he’d never counted on the gig lasting as long as it had. “I thought the band would be fun for a few years, and I needed to do something musically free and fun and liberating—but then I’d get back to the more serious career in the studio. I didn’t want to harm the group, but I didn’t want my family to fall apart either.”

  He made a convincing case. Grant was a family man; he understood the drawbacks of the rock ’n roll life. His wife, Gloria, was making similar noises about his constant absences. On the other hand, Led Zeppelin was a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Everyone’s livelihoods depended on it. Jonesy needed to get his priorities straight.

  “Have you told anyone else?” G asked him.

  John Paul shook his head. “No, I came straight to you.”

  “Well, you’re going to be not too well,” G said, meaning that he would report John Paul’s absence as a temporary illness. “Take some time off and think about it.”

  Even the band wasn’t told about Jonesy’s disenchantment. He was ill, he had some personal issues—that was all they needed to know. He wouldn’t be coming to Headley Grange for the time being. Instead, “the band spent a week or so just running down songs,” according to Ron Nevison. “They were doing Elvis covers and stuff like that.”

  “We began as always, playing around and fooling about for two days,” Robert recalled, “playing anything we want, like standards or our own material or anything that comes to us, and slowly but surely we develop a feel that takes us on to the new material.”

  One night, as a down-and-dirty trio, a loose jam produced versions of “Baby, I Don’t Care,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “One Night,” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” before segueing into the Drifters’ “Money Honey” and the old garage-band standby “Summertime Blues.” But amusing themselves like that eventually wore thin. Without John Paul they were just spinning their wheels. All three men had better things to do with their time. They decided to break camp and head home.

  That presented problems for Ron Nevison. “I’d made a commitment to Pete Townshend to start the Tommy film in late January,” he recalled, “and because of Jonesy not appearing for a week, I had to ask to leave the [Led Zeppelin] project.”

  The band went nuts. They gave Nevison a real bollicking, blaming him for running out and ruining their recording session. Bonzo predictably got nasty, Nevison said, “screaming at me, ‘You motherfucker, fuck you, you fucking . . .’ ”

  Considering Ron was on the payroll, G insisted that he remain at Headley Grange throughout November. To cover any losses, it was arranged that Paul Rodgers’s new band—one of the first acts signed to Led Zeppelin’s new label—would move in and use the time booked at the Grange to lay down some tracks, with Nevison as engineer. That session proved more productive than anyone had anticipated. “We’d been rehearsing like mad,” Rodgers recalled, “and we went in and recorded the entire album—banged it all down in one.” Boz Burrell, the bass player, marveled at their productivity. “We did eleven tracks in nine days,” he said. The band decided to name itself after one of its songs—Bad Company.

  * * *

  • • •

  Led Zeppelin took the Christmas holidays off. When the band reconvened at Headley Grange right after the new year, they were a quartet again. No one asked about Jonesy’s “illness,” and it was never discussed again. He was refreshed and ready to pick up where they’d left off. “Eventually,” Peter Grant concluded, “I think he just decided he was doing something he really loved.”

  Another topic that got glossed over was Robert Plant’s voice—it sounded throaty, gravelly. Unbeknownst to the others, he’d had an operation on his vocal cords and hadn’t been able to speak for three weeks. He could sing, but not up to his usual octave-piercing output.

  Jimmy’s enthusiasm made up for any obstacles they encountered. He’d been a busy man and came loaded with riffs that he’d mined over the holidays in his home studio at Plumpton Place. There were bits and pieces of what would eventually become “In the Light,” “Ten Years Gone,” and “The Wanton Song.” He also had a demo that he’d recorded with Bonzo. “He started the drums, and I did the riff and overdubs,” Jimmy recalled. It was just that, a shuffle and riff, but it was seductive, moody—Robert described it as a shoom shoom tempo—a sturdy foundation to build on.

  It was fortunate that Bonzo had found a groove. He’d arrived with Robert, driving a new souped-up BMW and carrying a bag that contained fifteen hundred doses of Mandrax, a powerful sedative that rose to fame under its other brand name, Quaalude.

  Benji Le Fevre, who’d been recruited to cook for the band, advised Bonzo to stash the pills somewhere safe, away from prying eyes. “A little later, he said to me, ‘Come and look,’ ” Le Fevre recalls. “He’d taped them to the inside of his tom-tom—forgetting, of course, that it was a Perspex [plexiglass] kit, so we could all see it.”

  When Robert heard that laid-back shoom shoom riff, he was suspicious. “Mandrax?” he posited. “No.” It had a livelier, more exotic-sounding spirit—“the feel of foreign lands . . . a touch of the east,” he concluded, that conjured up his recent holiday in southern Morocco, where he’d tinkered with some lyrics that might be of use. It also reminded him of a trip to India he’d taken with Jimmy in 1971, and imagery from the two recollections—the Himalayas and desert sands—gave him inspiration to work with.

  “I wrote the first verse before we had any music,” Robert recalled of the visit to Morocco. He was driving into the Sahara Desert, bumping down a dusty track, no sign of humanity for miles, other than the chance Bedouin on a camel who waved at Robert in a nonchalant way. “I just started to write a poem: ‘Let the sun beat down upon my face, and the stars to fill my dreams / I am a traveler of both time and space. . . .’ ”

  He recalled driving into the surrounding hills and feeling the eyes of people watching, as if he “were going through a no-man’s land between the borders, where all the Bhutan warriors sit with their horses and muskets, waiting for the tourists.” He thought of the Sufi trance musicians of Joujouka, and jotted down: “To sit with the elders of a gentler race the world has seldom seen. . . .”

  What it all boiled down to was “Kashmir.”

  “Kashmir” was epic, among the most accomplished songs Led Zeppelin ever recorded. “I had a long piece of music I’d been working on,” Jimmy recalled, “and just on the tail end of it I had that riff, that cascade with the brass parts.” Another riff, he said, “was going round, just going round and catching up with itself.” He could hardly wait to get to Headley Grange to see how the two figures resolved.

  From the opening chord sequence, a repetitive drone filled with trepidation and mystery, it sounded like a processional arriving from a far-off kingdom. As the pattern plodded ahead, guided by Robert’s timeless narrative, an orchestral fanfare leaped from the trenches, ambushing the moody Moorish theme and disrupting its forward flow. “I wondered whether the two parts could go on top of each other, and it worked!” Jimmy exulted. The rhythmic ground shifted, the two tempos pulling against each other like cultural adversaries defending their borders. It was an exciting tapestry of overlapping musical textures that, like its geographical origins, emphasized the distance the band had traveled. Only experienced musicians could have arrived at this destination.

  Later, Jimmy would overdub strings and horns with session players from a Pakistani orchestra based in London which, in his estimation, brought the song “even more to life” and rounded out the arrangement’s “ominous . . . particular quality.”

  The band knew with “Kashmir” they’d created something haunting, special. “I knew what ‘Kashmir’ was before we’d even recorded it,” Jimmy gloated. Robert eventually considered it “the definitive Led Zeppelin song.” To him, “Stairway to Heaven” was a trifle, whereas “Kashmir” evoked a time and place that had left its imprint, and he could convey it with conviction. Jimmy played a rough mix for Phil Carlo, the former Zeppelin roadie now working with Bad Company, and told him, “This is the best thing I’ve ever written.” And John Bonham was so excited about the song’s outcome, he called Peter Grant, breathlessly imploring him, “ ‘Kashmir’—Come down! Come down! Get in the Porsche and get down here!”

  “Kashmir” was a breakthrough. It set the bar high and raised the energy level a few notches, which primed the band to pick up the beat. There was a definite summoning back to the British electric-blues era, when the Yardbirds and Rolling Stones built their sounds on the backs of Mississippi Delta and Chicago mentors. The appropriation was never more evident than in “Custard Pie,” a discernibly Led Zeppelin interpretation of a twelve-bar blues. There were plenty of throwback references in the crevices, namely Blind Boy Fuller’s 1939 rendition of “I Want Some of Your Pie” and its 1947 heir, “Custard Pie Blues,” by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Robert’s lyrics were a near steal of “Drop Down Mama,” the Sleepy John Estes classic, with a little of Bukka White’s “Shake ’Em On Down” thrown in for good measure. But the arrangement was all Led Zeppelin. It highlighted the twin poles of the genre—the heritage it was rooted in and the direction in which they were taking it. The distorted vitriol of the guitar solo that stormed in, underscored by a scorching rhythm section, announced that the blues was entering another dimension.

  The drumming was especially vicious. The kit had been set up in the entryway of Headley Grange, at the foot of the stairwell, where it had done its thunderous spadework on “When the Levee Breaks” the year before.

  “When I got there, I put mics all around the drums,” Ron Nevison reported, “but Bonham told me not to use them, to take them down.” He assured Bonzo they were there “just in case,” but Bonzo was adamant. “No, not just in case—take them down!” He remembered how Andy Johns had managed to capture the snap and whomp with just two solitary mics and that overmicing muddied the sound.

  They’d used the same setup for “The Rover” back at Stargroves (although the song dates back to 1970 at Bron-Yr-Aur), with the benefit of Jimmy’s rollicking opening riff that spilled over into a high-strung, inebriated groove. “The Rover” is often referred to as the younger brother of “Whole Lotta Love,” but the groove is looser, funkier, and it doesn’t peddle a hodgepodge of sound effects and psychedelia swirling around the midsection to fatten the track. If anything held the song in check, it was Robert’s tortured vocal cords, which sounded forced into labor, straining for a foothold, much like Rod Stewart in the Jeff Beck Group.

  Be that as it may, “Custard Pie” and “The Rover”—the opening numbers on what would be the next album—signaled a blatant return to form for Led Zeppelin, the form that earned them kudos for the highest-energy rock ’n roll since Jerry Lee Lewis bashed out “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” These interpretations of American blues incorporated the furious kineticism of garage-band pugnacity with fresh, inventive licks.

  The energy was high at Headley Grange. The guys were stoked. They worked long hours each day, laying down tracks for eight new songs, with ample time set aside for R&R. “There was a lot of camaraderie at that point,” says Benji Le Fevre, “four young men really enjoying themselves.” The atmosphere was laid-back and loose. They met for breakfast at a greasy-spoon diner on the A3 each morning, then sat around the living-room fireplace with an array of instruments at their feet, exchanging ideas.

  “Some artists like to sit down and plan an album,” Robert explained. “We just can’t do that. Our music is more an impromptu thing. It falls out of your head and onto the floor, and you pick it up and it bounces. That’s how it works.”

  And sometimes a little extra was needed to stimulate inspiration. “There were quite a lot of drugs coming through the door,” Benji recalls. At times, Headley Grange was better provisioned than a pharmacy. There was hashish, Quaaludes, acid, heroin, and enough cocaine to light up a small city. “You’d just work and break for dinner, and then ‘Charlie’ would turn up,” Ron Nevison said.